The Slush Fund Kerfuffle

Description

We discuss the slush fund kerfuffle with Professor Smauel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services and has written a forthcoming article on slush funds. One theme is that Trump’s lawyers got a decent way toward giving J6 rioters access to federal funds in a way consistent with the formal law but muffed it at the level of detail. Another is that it’s really silly—and says something bad about some kinds of discourse about this sort of thing—to focus on legal formality. And, if you hold out until the end you get one of Mark’s favorite quotations about lawyers, from Carl Sandburg.